


SWEET DREAMS

by cailures



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Dreamsharing, M/M, Team Bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-22
Updated: 2020-08-22
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:00:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26035312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cailures/pseuds/cailures
Summary: THE PALADINS ALL START DREAMSHARING WITH EACH OTHER AND HAVE TO GO ON A QUEST TO FIX IT.
Relationships: Keith/Shiro (Voltron)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 35
Collections: CAILURE EXCHANGE 2020





	SWEET DREAMS

**Author's Note:**

> FOR #11

The night after their dream about Bob, they dream of scanning a quintessence field, feeling the readings lining up perfectly as the logic of the atoms builds up in their mind like bees building a perfectly structured honeycomb. Numbers flash in exquisitely ordered columns, a feeling of triumph and joy, and a high-five from Dad - or Doc Holt, as the rest of them would call him once they wake up and they’re not in Pidge’s head anymore.

“OK, but are we, like, going to share dreams all the time?” Lance crinkles up his face. 

“Yeah, and why is this just starting now?” Pidge cuts in. 

“Well, that’s an interesting question!” Coran sounds far too chipper, the way he only does when something profoundly weird is going on. “It’s likely a side effect of spending so much time in your lions and a normal part of the bonding process - it’s really a positive sign! But if you do want to stop it, the only way is to lay our hands on some violet ice crystals.”

“Is it going to happen again?”

“Is it going to happen every night?”

“That’s possible,” Allura confirms.

“Oh, god, I’m never sleeping again.”

“If we sleep in shifts, can we stop it?”

“Hunk, can you make us some kind of super-strength space coffee?”

“What, like four-hour shifts? There are five of us!”

“GUYS,” Keith yells over the overlapping questions. “Coran, how far away are the violet ice crystals?”

“Roughly two qintants.” 

“That’s not too bad.”

“Yeah, unless we’re going to be all up in each other’s minds all night every night!”

“Lance, do we even want to know what you’re so concerned about sharing?” That’s Hunk, looking half scared, half intrigued. Over his shoulder, Shiro frowns.

“No,” chorus Pidge, Lance, and Allura. 

“Once we have the violet ice crystals, it should be a very quick process to stop the shared dreams,” Allura offers. “It’ll just be for a few quintants until we get there.

.

It’s always hard around Shiro now - he never knows where to look or what to do with his hands, or when he’s going to finally lose it and just start screaming something completely ridiculous like _I love you_ At least sleeping four hours every day gives him a built-in excuse to be grumpy and twitchy. 

“How come you didn’t get freaky communal dreams?” Keith grumbles at Shiro, pinching himself for the third time in 10 minutes. “This is so unfair.”

Shiro laughs, but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “Probably for the best.”

Keith rarely even dreams, and when he does, it’s usually stupid random things - he’s trying to talk to Shiro, but Shiro is only speaking Galra, which for some reason he suddenly can’t understand. Or his mom is insisting that he cook “family recipes” he doesn’t know about. Nothing he’s particularly enthused about sharing with the group, but none of it really means anything. 

.

By the time they get to the tiny planet where the violet ice crystals grow, everyone’s sanity is a little bit frayed. According to Pidge’s scanners, the largest outcropping of crystals is just at the mouth of a cave system that starts at the shore of the planet’s largest ocean and extends nearly 25 miles back to a huge salt flat that used to be an inland sea. 

“I see them.” Pidge’s voice is high and verging on manic. She pulls up the display on all of their screens - surface topography, with an overlay of the cave system spreading out like a massive underground river delta, and a bright notification highlighting the crystal deposits at one end.

"Romelle, Krolia," says Shiro, "Why don't you stay up here with Kosmo and one of the lions, just in case whatever's down there isn't totally friendly. We might need an extraction.

"They can stay in Yellow," Hunk volunteers. "Hang on, Pidge, coming your way now."

.

They park on a long, low outcropping of rock overlooking a pebbled beach. There doesn’t seem to be any sentient life on the planet, and barely any plants, just periodic patches of a thin, white-gray moss on the rocks. The water in the ocean is also white - Keith can’t tell if it’s just the way the planet’s sun sheds light on the surface or whether it’s actually chemically different from the water he’s used to. He’s too far beyond exhausted to pay it much thought. 

The violet ice crystals look more like a powdery rock, like sandstone but a purple so light it’s almost translucent and glittering from every bump and rough spot. Allura starts chipping off chunks to bring with them and brushes off all attempts to help her on the reasonable grounds that none of them really know what they’re looking for. 

“Oh my god, just give me this stuff and show me a bed,” moans Hunk. His hands are shaking from too many experiments with space coffee. He did eventually find something that will reliably keep them all awake, but it tastes like mashed potatoes and the prospect of drinking potatoes is just…

Keith thinks of his first midterms at the Garrison, still in the library at 3am with his brain rattling around in his head from two cans of Red Bull. He remembers the twitchy, shaky feeling, the uncontrollable tremors in his legs. He hadn’t planned on studying at all until Shiro had passed him, clapped him on the shoulder, and expressed his firm conviction that Keith would do great. He got four As and two Bs, and the smug joy of showing his trigonometry grade to his least favorite TA was fun, but the elation of Shiro physically lifting him off the ground in celebration was enough motivation to actually start studying for his next exams six weeks in advance. 

Keith shakes himself. Shiro is listening to Pidge extemporize a Ph.D. thesis on the mineral composition of the violet ice crystals and its likely relationship to space-time phenomena. As Pidge is still talking, he catches Keith looking at him and smiles automatically, the way you smile at an acquaintance you see on the street. Keith tips his chin up in a hopefully friendly way and immediately grabs Hunk to ask about the possibilities for non-potato space Red Bull. 

As he’s opening his mouth, there’s a high-pitched scream above them, and out of the clear sky, something is dive-bombing them with terrible, vibrating shrieks. 

“It’s a dragon!” Hunk screams, and throws himself through the mouth of the cave, yanking Keith in with him. 

“Dragons are imaginary!” Lance screams back, but Hunk has a point. It sure looks like a dragon, and whatever they want to call it, it has sharp claws and sharp teeth and it’s still making that horrible noise. Keith’s head throbs; he needs to move, but he can’t think.

Allura is already inside, but Shiro’s still out there - _Shiro’s still out there_ \- Keith startles up to run out after him, only for both Lance and Hunk to grab his ankles and send him sprawling on his face. 

“Don’t be an idiot,” Hunk yells in his ear, and while Keith’s still struggling with him, Shiro ducks inside after Corran and Pidge. “Defensive positions,” he yells. “Keith, can you - “ but whatever he was going to say, it’s cut off by the deafening crash as the mouth of the cave collapses in a pile of choking dust and flying pebbles. 

Keith crawls backwards, grabbing the nearest limb. Leg. Probably Allura’s leg, judging from the size. It’s pitch black. He taps the leg three times with his knuckles, and probably-Allura twitches the leg three times in response. Keith feels up along the side of the body until he finds an arm, then a hand, and weaves their fingers together. Probably-Allura squeezes. 

Shiro’s voice is coming to him as if he’s underwater, distorted and hazy, but it’s soothing just to hear his tone anyway. As long as Shiro is talking, they can’t be that screwed, right? Keith creeps backwards on his belly, dragging probably-Allura, until he bumps into someone else. Someone else grabs his foot and reaches up for his shoulder. They feel clumsily at each other - this one is definitely Hunk.

The ringing in his ears is starting to go down. Shiro’s voice is coming into focus, and suddenly there’s a light in front of his eyes. Keith flinches away until he sees Pidge holding up a flashlight, shining it over him, Allura, and Hunk all holding hands, with Lance three feet away from them in the darkness. Across what used to be the cave mouth, Shiro is helping Coran sit up against the wall. 

.

The mouth of the cave is blocked so thoroughly that Pidge can’t promise they won’t bring down another collapse by trying to clear it. And they're apparently too deep underground for their communicators to have any range - none of them can get anything but an error message. 

"Maybe something in the planet's crust is blocking the radio transmission," Pidge muses, walking around as if the signal is going to get better in another part of the cave.

Keith takes a breath, trying to steady his thoughts enough to make some kind of plan, but Shiro is already ahead of him. “We’ll have to walk through to the other end.”

“Are you sure the opening at the other end isn’t also guarded by those...whatever they are?”

“No,” says Pidge, “but I’m sure it’s at least open, which is more than I can say for this one.”

With nothing else to do, they set off walking. It’s almost pitch black - Shiro has his emergency beacon on at the lowest setting to save power. It silhouettes his back in orange-yellow shadows and illuminates a tiny segment of the cave wall. It has the same sandstone texture as the crystals, but dull and colorless, with nothing to pick up the light. It’s worn smooth, like the canyon walls back home from the wind. 

It’s hard to know how long they walk for, but after the third time he trips over his own feet while walking on perfectly flat sand, Keith stops. “You guys. This is ridiculous. We’re going to have to sleep.” His voice comes out scratchy and flat. 

“But - "

“Look, I’m not any happier about it than anyone else, but it’s how long, Pidge? 25 miles? You really think we’re going to walk 25 miles without sleeping at all?”

“Well, 25 miles point to point; the actual walking route will be longer because it kind of twists around. But - "

“Keith is right,” Allura cuts in. “This is going to be impossible unless we can all get some rest.”

“Easy for you to say! You probably have perfect princess dreams about...negotiating techniques, or something!” Lance sounds almost hysterical. Allura, thankfully, chooses not to respond. 

There’s a tense silence as everyone realizes the inevitable. They stare stupidly at each other, too tired to come up with a single workable alternate plan or even a coherent objection. Hunk breathes out, slowly, and drops down onto the floor with a resigned thunk. 

Keith shines the torch around them - they’re in a relatively open area, a kind of bulge in the cave. The “floor” is more of the flat gray sand, probably as comfortable as they’re going to get, under the circumstances. 

“I’ll take the first watch; Coran, you take the second,” Shiro says. “Since we’ve actually been sleeping.” 

Keith’s brain feels bruised and useless, spinning out little useless tendrils of thoughts that he can’t seem to follow through with thinking. He’s so glad Shiro is here to make decisions and be an actual leader, not...well, whatever he was trying to pretend to be. He’s still trying to decide whether or not sleeping is actually a good idea when he conks out right where he’s sitting. 

Allura’s dreams, at least on this particular night, aren’t about negotiating techniques. Mostly they’re furious, in a way Allura is never furious in the waking world - she’s piloting the blue lion through hordes of Galra ships, chasing Lotor, pouring fire into his ship until it’s crippled and then tearing him out of the cockpit to scream her pain into his dimming eyes while he slowly suffocates. She _is_ Voltron, and she’s hunting him down like a cat hunts a mouse, toying with him, laughing in brutal joy as he scampers uselessly one way and another. Keith can feel her own disappointment in herself through the dream, but the revenge is impossibly addictive. 

He wakes up feeling gross and slimy for invading her privacy, and somehow less rested than he felt before going to sleep. Allura is hugging her knees to her chest, looking miserable. He hears a thump from across the room and looks up to see Pidge tackle-hugging her. Before he can move, Lance is joining in, and then they’re all piling on for an awkward group hug.

“That was awful,” Hunk says. “I mean, understandable, but awful. No offense, Alllura.”

“I don’t - ” Allura shakes her head. “It’s not a way I would condone behaving.”

“That’s why it’s a dream, duh. It’s not like you’re going to do any of that really.” 

“Anyway, your dream was wrong,” says Lance. “It didn’t have us watching your back to make sure you don’t do that stuff. Tell your subconscious for next time.”

“Yeah, what kind of BS dream logic is that?” asks Pidge.

Lance, Hunk, and Keith all turn to stare at her. “You dream about math,” says Lance, incredulously. “ _Math._ ”

Allura squeezes all of them tighter. 

The light from Shiro’s emergency lantern suddenly gets brighter. Shiro hasn’t joined the pile-on. He’s sitting up against the wall, watching them.

Hunk looks at him and winces. “Yeah, Shiro, man, no offense and all, but I am _so glad_ you’re not playing Dream Roulette with us right now.” 

Shiro grimaces and pushes himself to his feet. “Well, we’re all up. Now let’s get out of here before you all need to sleep again.”

“Yes.”

It’s another day of stumbling through tunnels in the darkness, trying to conserve the batteries in everyone’s emergency lights as much as possible, since they’re going to be down here for a while. The floor of the cave is mostly sandy gravel, with periodic outcroppings of solid rock; at the very least, there don’t seem to be any more dragons, or any other kind of animal life at all down here, although there’s also no running water and the tiny portable dehumidifiers in their emergency kits weren’t designed to produce enough liquid for hour after hour of physical activity. 

Sixteen hours later, it’s very clear that’s not going to happen. Keith’s feet are dragging over the floor and his muscles are getting uncoordinated again from fatigue and hunger and dehydration.

“How is it taking so long? Shouldn’t we be there by now?”

“Maybe we’re lost down here,” Hunk wails. “Maybe we’ll never get out and we’ll just be here dreaming all over each other forever!”

“We’re not lost,” Shiro says. “Just moving slow in the dark. But it’s been sixteen hours since the last time you all slept, and I don’t think rest breaks are going to cut it anymore.”

“If I sit down for another rest break, I’m just going to fall asleep,” Hunk declares, then realizes what he just said. “Fuck.”

They find another patch of cave that’s more sand than pebble and pick their spots to bed down. “I wish we could have a fire, at least,” Lance says. “This is so depressing.”

“I wish we could have some _food_ ,” Hunk shoots back.

“Don’t remind me,” Pidge says angrily. “I was doing so well not thinking about it!”

“I’m telling you, guys, if we get my dreams tonight it’s all going to be real beds and my mom’s cooking. Huge piles of rice, crispy roasted pork - “

“HUNK.”

“OK, OK, shutting up now.”

Keith drifts off to the sound of breathing in the darkness and falls directly into a long, winding nightmare about endless dark staircases and corridors - they look Galra, but rusted and half-broken, like this is a place the Galra haven’t cared about in a while. Whatever he’s wearing, it’s thin and dirty and weirdly ill-fitting: the pants sag around the knees and the cuffs drag behind his heels on the ground. He’s hungry too. Definitely not Hunk’s dream, then. 

His dream-body is cold down to his bones in the way that means he’s been cold for a while; his fingers are clumsy with it and he hugs his arms to his chest. Well. His arm. The other one is cut off at the shoulder, and suddenly it dawns on him who he must be.

Above him, the lions are fighting. Through some weird dream-logic, he can hear the yells for help over the comms. _I can’t maneuver - Lance, a little backup? - Allura, behind you! - They’ve got him! I can’t get him out - Pidge! Not you too!_ The paladins are flailing, and as he watches they’re immobilized in space, swarmed by so many Galra ships he can barely see the lions. 

“They’re of no use to the cloning facility,” Honerva says from behind him. “They will be put to death. But you...” She’s laughing. “You have a long time left, before you join them.”

There’s nobody left in the galaxy who knows where he is, except the Galra. He’s going to be here forever. 

Keith wakes up screaming, his voice echoing in the cave, and before he’s really back to conscious thought, he’s halfway across the passageway, groping for Shiro in the light of the emergency lantern, grabbing his shoulders and shaking him like he can shake the dream right out of his head. 

“Shiro, Shiro, wake up, it didn’t happen like that, remember, you’re OK - ”

Shiro blinks awake, looking at him in baffled alarm. “Keith. What?”

“Your dream!”

“Keith, I wasn’t dreaming.”

“Keith, he isn’t sharing with us...right?” Hunk is at his shoulder now. Keith’s head spins. He sits back on his heels, adrenaline draining out of his body and leaving him limp and confused. 

“Right,” says Keith, slowly. “But - ”

“I wasn’t dreaming at all,” Shiro repeats. 

“Keith, I think that was your dream,” Allura says softly.

.

He’s definitely not rested after that, stumbling along silently in the dark and avoiding Shiro as much as possible. They all just need to get out of here before they’re too hungry to walk; everything else can wait, but with nothing else to think about, it gnaws at him just under the ribcage.

“Probably not too long from here,” Shiro says. “Just based on how fast we’ve been walking. Pidge can probably do better math than I can, though.”

To Keith’s eternal gratitude, Pidge pulls up beside him and demands that he work as her human memory bank, meaning that Keith remembers seemingly random numbers while Pidge does some kind of calculations in her head and then periodically asks him to confirm one or the other of the various values he’s remembering for her. It’s not his very favorite type of conversation, but given his options, “Keith!” “Square root of three.” is a lot better than discussing...well, whatever that dream was. 

“Keith!”

“Five pi over two.”

Pidge hums a little, and then clears her throat. “According to my calculations, we’ll be reaching the mouth of the cave in approximately one varga.”

Lance whoops, although the effect is somewhat ruined by the raspiness of his dehydrated voice. “All right! One more hour, then some delicious violet space crystal whatever, and then...a nap!”

“And food,” Hunk and Pidge chime in at once. 

They emerge almost exactly on schedule, squinting and blinking in the unforgiving light of the salt flats. All at once, everyone’s communicators start beeping and buzzing - Keith scrolls through days of frantic messages from Krolia and Romelle before he realizes that Shiro is already talking to them and before he’s even done, Kosmo is poofing into existence, nuzzling at Shiro’s hands and running over to beg Pidge for scratches behind the ears before he lopes over to knock Keith over and sit on his chest. 

“Sorry, Kosmo. Tell my mom I didn’t mean to scare her, okay?” Kosmo licks his face emphatically and Keith splutters. 

Lance cackles. 

.

They park the lions just outside the salt flats end of the cave system while Kosmo takes Allura down to the mouth of the cave for an in-and-out crystal-gathering stealth operation. (“Are you sure you don’t need a...bodyguard?” “Lance, I’ll be five minutes, and if the dragons are still there, we’ll just come right back.” “OK, but are you _sure_ \- ” “Lance.”). 

While Allura grinds up her crystals and sifts them into pill capsules, Hunk disappears into the yellow lion and emerges with - 

“Hunk, is this spaghetti bolognese?” Pidge’s eyes light up with delight. “Space spaghetti bolognese?”

“It’s green,” says Lance skeptically.

“It’s delicious,” says Keith, through a mouthful. “Just close your eyes.”

.

He’s just finishing up an actual shower, pleasantly full of green spaghetti - and, afterwards, hot pink chocolate chip cookies - when his communicator beeps. When he switches the video feed on, he sees Shiro standing outside the black lion, so he rolls his eyes and asks her politely to let him in. 

“You know you could just ask Kosmo. Or really, you probably could just ask Black. I bet she’d let you in, wouldn’t you?” That last part he addresses to the air above him: Black hums a happy affirmative in his head. 

Shiro shrugs. “I figured you might not appreciate me busting into your space with no warning.”

Keith’s throat hurts. _I’ve wanted you in my space for my whole life_ \- the words almost come out of his mouth, but at the last minute, he diverts that thought to the lockbox at the back of his mind where it belongs and says “should I be worried?”

“You dreamed about me?”

“I - you were in Galra...prison, I guess?” Keith says, before he can stop himself. “And I was trying to save you; we all were, but we couldn’t. But in the dream, I was you, knowing you were going to be in prison there forever, and Honerva was there laughing - you were so cold.” He shakes himself. “It was just a stupid dream; I’m sorry I overreacted.”

“Keith - ” Shiro grabs him in a one-armed hug and Keith clings to him. He always forgets how much bigger Shiro is - frustrating in a fight, but comforting when he can squeeze his eyes shut and stand there counting Shiro’s heartbeats like a complete weirdo. 

“It might happen,” he insists, after a minute. “Don’t give me some bullshit about how it’s never going to happen. It might.”

“It might,” Shiro agrees, rubbing his hand up and down Keith’s back. “Or it might happen to you. That’s the risk we take.”

“Honerva isn’t freakishly obsessed with me.”

“And I’m not a member of an underground resistance group the Galra would just love to stamp out.”

Keith breathes in and out, but he really has nothing to say to that, or at least nothing that makes any fucking sense, just incoherent, furious frustration spiking his heart rate and shooting tingles of useless adrenaline into his fingers.

He really should stop hugging Shiro now. He doesn’t, but Shiro doesn’t seem to mind. He takes a deep, uneven breath and tries to talk himself down from the extremely stupid idea currently worming its way into his brain. 

“Keith, what’s wrong?” Shiro is rubbing his back; it feels amazing and he never wants it to stop. 

With an effort, Keith pulls his head off Shiro’s chest. He looks up at his face one more time to memorize it in case Shiro never wants to look at him again, and then kisses him before he can chicken out. 

Shiro startles briefly, but then his hand tightens between Keith’s shoulders and he’s kissing back, hard and possessive. Keith feels like he’s being punched in the chest; the feeling is too big to stand still, so he pushes Shiro back against the wall and thrills at the way Shiro lets him. 

“Mmmph. Keith.”

Keith would just as soon not stop, but unfortunately for him, Shiro is stronger and also has actually slept more than a few hours here and there over the past week. 

“Keith. Easy, okay? Your hands are shaking.”

Keith gulps in air, trying to calm down and behave like a normal person, but Shiro is right there with that look like he’s trying to be responsible but keeps being delighted instead because he just can’t help himself. Shiro’s hand rubs up and down his back.

“Shiro? Look, if you don’t want to - ”

“Oh, I very much do.” Shiro pushes Keith’s bangs out of his face, cups his cheek, presses a light kiss to his mouth. “Keith, I’ve wanted you for years; I never thought.” He breaks off, looks down at the floor. “Well. It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters,” Keith insists. “Everything about you matters to me, Shiro; you’re everything. ” It’s embarrassing, or it ought to be, but the relief of saying it lifts something off his chest and he can’t even be too upset about how dumb it sounds. Shiro slides down the wall to sit on the floor, pulling Keith down on top of him, and they stay there for a long time, until the short nights of the past week come crashing down on Keith’s head and he’s struggling to keep his eyes open. 

“You need sleep.”

“Stay with me? I promise, I won’t scream in your face to wake you up this time.”

The bunks in the lions definitely weren’t made for two, but it’s probably the best 12 hours of sleep Keith has ever had. He doesn’t dream.


End file.
